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Deeper Perception Made Practical

Use Your Creativity

It’s not enough to BE talented. Give some of your talent away: Use your creativity.

Do you long to use your creativity more? Please do.

Creativity makes us human. When children first go to school, they are invited to create, create, create.

Remember how proud preschooler GLADYS would bring home a song she learned. Then she would create a performance for you.

Tiny Tot Performance Art. Yum!

Later that day, little GLADYS might treat you to 20 variations on that same performance.

To you, this might seem like repetition. Yet for GLADYS, it was an ever-fresh festival of fun.

Kids are born with boundless creativity. Including you, back in the day. What if you don’t remember how to use that creativity? You can learn afresh.

Goofy Creativity, Yours to Use “Just Because”

Take inspiration from creativity in children. How kids carry home their colorful paintings. Messy creativity feels natural to them.

Meanwhile parents feel good, receiving each gift. These “works of art” simply ripple with joy at being alive.

Some funny little “useful object” made of clay or the like. A loving parent will keep it around, right? Maybe for years.

Actually, I have one such object on my desk right now. (Next to my computer monitor.) If you’re here for a session, ask me to show it to you: An oddly shaped clay dish, mustard yellow in hue. Definitely, this is not museum quality.

My son MATT made it in kindergarten.

I love this dish, even though by artistic standards it would probably be deemed “ugly.” Although not to me. To me this is a vessel of love. Whenever I see it, I light up.

Even the clumsy initials MATT carved on the bottom. Even that, I love. Undoubtedly his scribble on the clay helped his teacher to tell apart each of these strangely configured wads of creativity, captured in clay.

Well, the message comes through loud and clear.

Encoded in that funny-looking dish is MATT’s kindy-aged way of beaming his Mom with love.

We Adults Can Use Creativity Just as Much as Kids

Having The Yellow Thing on my desk makes me happy. Probably that’s because of how it makes me feel, more than simply its appearance. Or, ahem, utility.

What happens when I catch a glimpse of that Thing, covered with public-school-budget golden paint?

Could be gold leaf, far as I’m concerned. Seeing my son’s creation reminds me of the quality of love that he had for me back then. Also, how I loved him then.

Different from how he loves me now, at 25! Or how I love the man he is now.

Whatever you create can serve as a vessel of love, a lasting treasure.

Don’t be shy. Use your creativity to give gifts to others. Transmitting a message of love can be your goal, not museum-quality perfection. And, as adults, our opportunities to use creativity are unlimited.

How Can You Use More Creativity?

Creativity is where many of us adults get stuck. Don’t wait for somebody to give you an assignment.

Variations on what you’re already doing count as creativity. So many things we do routinely can be tweaked into “Use my creativity.” For instance:

Solve a problem, like “Where can my mother hold a few lipsticks… 20 years from now?” 😉

Make something new, any which way. You can use creativity to write a poem. Do karaoke. Dance the corniest dance, ever — just to make your loved one smile.

Combine routine things in a new way, like how you serve yourself dinner. Where do you put what on the plate? Swirl it up. Stripe it on. Glob on the salsa!

What Else Can Help You to Use More Creativity?

If it helps you get moving, remember that your supplies include a limitless wealth of love. Whenever you use creativity, direct it towards expressing how you feel towards a person you like or love.

Since creativity is a flow, you may find yourself more inventive than ever.

Especially if you hate doing the same thing twice, add that bit of love or playfulness to make somebody smile. (Whether yourself or somebody else.) That counts as using creativity, you know.

For example, GLADYS isn’t enamoured of making her bed. But she bought one of those pillow sets along with a fresh bedspread. Now she’s got 10 (!!!!!Ten!!!!!) different pillows to live-sculpt whenever she makes her bed.

With her new art form, GLADYS plays with different ways of arranging those pillows. Never the same, two days in a row!

Honestly, why do anything the same way every day?

Are you just taking measurements for your coffin?

Why do that, when your path to Enlightenment could be decorated with your creativity?

GLADYS gets to use her creativity to please the one she shares the bed with. Just a little something fun. Every single day. Why not?

Forget any Pressures. When Using Creativity, Free Yourself Up

For the aspiring movie star, creativity demanded fame. Apparently creativity through acting wasn’t enough in itself. Otherwise, when Brittany Murphy stopped getting good roles, when then? Maybe she could have changed her lifestyle, done acting part time. Acting for the love of it. Acting to give to others.

Evidently to Brittany Murphy, creativity for its own sake wasn’t enough. Using her creativity meant being recognized and lauded. Maybe Academy Awarded.

Especially relevant to today’s discussion, isn’t that a weird distortion of creativity?

Why would your joyful use of creativity depend on external validation? Isn’t it enough that you create and it brings some joy into this world? Can’t that be enough?

So What If We Live in a Vanity Culture!

Use your creativity to dance. You don’t have to be seen on “Dancing with the Stars.”

Use your creativity to sing. Not every good singer can earn a slot on “The Voice.”

Don’t let our crazy-making vanity culture rob you of a precious gift.

When you use your creativity, let it be innocent.

Like any good thing we humans can do, using creativity is ultimately spiritual.

To Use Creativity, Be Generous (Not Judgey)

What do I mean here? Use creativity to make life more fun, for yourself and others:

Fun can motivate you.

Or service to others.

Or the impulse for variety.

Or love, expressed through an art form as silly as arranging bedroom pillows.

Why let society’s values control your creativity? Use that creativity to express innocent joy in the moment. The more freely you use your creativity, the easier it will become for you to find your sacred flow. At. Everything.

Now Let’s Hear From You Blog-Buddies. How Do YOU Like to Use Creativity?

I’ll start the ball rolling with this share:

Resources to use creativity.

I can walk through every room of my house and find supplies that I’ve collected on purpose. Simply to use for creativity.

Have you also put together informal “toy boxes” throughout your home? Creativity supplies might be anywhere… in the form of a musical instrument that you can pick up. Or a box of aromatherapy fragrances.

Here, some jars of cooking spices; there, a glorious and messy collection of crayons.

Can’t you find that too? If not, why not? Gather together some of those resources and you’ll find yourself using your creativity more.

When I mix in those toy boxes with love, bam! Creativity just flows.

And when something you create is appreciated by somebody else, isn’t that one of the sweetest feelings ever?

My daughter’s sixteenth party is coming up and we’re doing it as a Taskmaster party where the guests do various creative tasks (Impress me. You have one minute) and at the end of the evening there will be a prize.

This one in an attempt to try and avoid the ‘get drunk and make a mess’ tendency of teenage parties. 🙂

If you think about all the endless ways women think about and support their children (like I’m sure you do with Matt, Rose)… sure its sweet, but also its literally making the next generation stronger and more able to survive and more able to contribute to society as adults.

(And my numerical creativity comes from the same magical place as my other sources of creativity. I’m not a robot, … lol. Though I know its generally less relatable than if I talked about painting, for example.)

I read an autobiography of rural Irish life once and there were two neighbours on an island.

One neighbour was super good as practical things like fixing the huts, while the other one could remember all the saints days, traditions, stories etc which kept up moral and made their hard-working lives a bit more magical.

But they both appreciated the other. This probably explains why my kind haven’t been wiped out by a famine. lol.

Thanks Lilian. Great comments! I love your story of the neighbors. I haven’t been to Ireland, but when I went to Scotland I noticed how many people were happy to tell you stories or break into a song. So different from American culture, I loved it.

I read an article recently about how kids don’t play freely very often anymore. Parents are afraid they will get hurt, and there aren’t many communal spaces where kids can count on being able to go there (for free) find other kids and do fun things.

So they stay at home playing on their devices.

One man created a “playborhood” in his back yard, encouraged all of the neighborhood kids to come there.

Regarding Comment #29, I’d like to give special acknowledgement to you, DAVID B. It so happens that some of your creativity for writing about very abstract subjects shows up in an important way at your blog.

For all you Blog-Buddies interested in the nuances of the other kind of Enlightenment — not the Householder Enlightenment that I write about but the other, more universally recognized kind — which I’m calling “The Surrender Model of Enlightenment” — you really can’t do better than to read the latest at Davidya.ca

For instance, check out the magnificent new post called “Further Stages.”

Rose, I agree. I think the steady force of being is a person creating.

Life is creativity, at least it seems that way to me. Often the word means artistry in the traditional sense, but that isn’t all it is.

My son may not be able to hold a pen or a brush but he is, as you say, creating all the time. He loves numbers and letters and in our local park there is a line of letters painted on the playground that make up the alphabet. My son always walks the alphabet, meandering from letter to letter and he sings his own alphabet song. It’s lovely. His own way of creating.

It’s interesting how creativity shows up and takes different forms. I like to write but then stop short thinking no one will get what I’m saying. BUT then that’s an assumption and an unnecessary judgement.

I find this so encouraging: “The more freely you use your creativity, the easier it will become for you to find your sacred flow. At. Everything.”

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